Plenary 11: Kosuke Iwai

A Continuous-Flow Microdroplets Lysing System - Microbeads and Nanoparticles

Microdroplet-based technologies are ideally suited for a wide range of chemical and biological applications. Although researchers have developed highly effective methods for handling droplets within microfluidic systems, difficulties still remain for retrieving the inner contents of droplets (e.g., biomolecules, reagents, cells, and microbeads). To achieve this goal, we propose and demonstrate a versatile, continuous flow microfluidic system for "lysing" microdroplets.
Our microfluidic platform passively: (i) guides droplets between different liquids (i.e., oil flow and water flow), (ii) washes the surfactant of microdroplets, and (iii) lyses the droplets to release their contents into the water flow. The presented system was employed to wash and lyse water-in-oil droplets, and subsequently separate the contents from the oil within a few minutes.